Feminist assessment of emancipatory potential and Madonna's contradictory gender practices

The hallmark of Madonna's career has been her contradictory play with gender roles and images. While the analytic foci are varied, feminist evaluations of Madonna's contradictory gender play continue to employ binary models of assessing Madonna as either challenging or reinforcing gender roles. To move out of this binary model and to analyze instead how Madonna's contradictory practices both challenge and reinforce gender, new analytic tools must be employed. This essay proposes a collaboration between feminist rhetorical analysis and schizoanalysis as one route to meet this new need in feminist rhetorical criticism. A feminist‐schizoanaly tic perspective is applied to Madonna's The Immaculate Collection to illustrate the perspective's potential for developing criteria for evaluating the emancipatory potential contained in contradictory texts such as those of Madonna.